charliedoggett.net
My dermatologist (after 2 skin cancers) says I have to wear a wide-brim hat everytime I go out along with sunscreen. Bummer – but here’s my first one (a Dorfman Pacific Safari Hat) which is like what a neighbor wears everyday, so I won’t be alone! 🙂 Then with a Christmas gift certificate I ordered a Panama Jack Safari Hat which might be more stylish. The price you pay living close to the equator! ¡Pura Vida!
Excellent first person account of living in the earlier, wilder Costa Rica as a twenty-something, then adapting and growing older here. Especially good for nature-lovers like me as a “Retired in Costa Rica” senior adult blogging about it at charliedoggett dot net. ¡Pura Vida!
— Goodreads Review by Charlie Doggett
And I read the real book on paper! It is not available digitally for my Kindle. Thanks to a friend here in Atenas who loaned the book!
HAPPY, HAPPY – – – to you and your family, friends, and communities this Christmas! While some of you enjoy a White Christmas, I will be enjoying the beaches and rainforests of Manuel Antonio National Park and the private Wildlife Refuge of Si Como No Resort there. – – – HAPPY, HAPPY! 🙂
¡Pura Vida!
Photo is of a Caribe sunrise, Hotel Banana Azul,
Puerto Viejo, Costa Rica.
¡Pura Vida!
My prayers go to the Bush Family in their loss . . .
. . . a truly great & humble man!
George H. W. Bush
Humility is not thinking less of yourself,
it’s thinking of yourself less.
~C. S. Lewis
REPORT ON MY BIOPSY: After removing the 10 stitches from my arm (where all that cancer was confirmed removed) and the two stitches from my face for the biopsy, Dr. Gamboa gave me the facial biopsy report:
In brief, it says I have another carcinoma cancer on my face which is a smaller and slower growing type than the one on my arm. No problem waiting until January to remove the rest of it (the biopsy took most of it). Because of the delicate and thinner skin location next to my eye, we will be doing a more complicated and more efficient (more expensive) “Mohs Surgery” with two doctors doing it with a pathologist standing by to make sure they get all of the cancer as he examines each layer as removed (continuous biopsy). It will not be in his office this time but in a clinic, hospital-like, operating room, but still out-patient. He is checking on availability of other doctor and the clinic for the week of 21 January – after my Boca Tapada trip. Remember — the doctors work around my trips! 🙂 Important! That is where I sleep in a tree house 5 nights!
Dr. Gamboa also “PRESCRIBED” wearing a wide-brim hat instead of the ball caps I’ve been wearing and of course sunscreen every day when out. I sure love sunny Costa Rica, just 673 miles north of the equator, but with the value of the sun also comes with some potential dangers for someone like me who loves the outdoors. I have already become more careful, even though the doc says these current growths and cancers were probably caused by sun I got as a child or teen, more sun now can make it worse, so I must be cautious.
¡Still Pura Vida! 🙂
I am beginning a new stories section of my website titled Travel. It will eventually have many stories of my many trips around the world (outside Costa Rica) with some illustrative photos along with links to the newest section of my Photo Gallery titled Pre-Costa Rica Travels. where I am slowly creating a gallery on each trip over the years or at least the recent years, one at a time as I slowly move such photos from the Travel Section of my old Pbase gallery. PHOTO ABOVE: Masai Shepherd in Kenya
Writing the stories and moving the photos are both very slow and time-consuming jobs, but time is what an ol’ retiree has isn’t it? 🙂
For multiple reasons, I decided to start with Africa in both the Travel Stories and the Photo Gallery sections. The photos are mostly moved but all of the stories have not been written yet. I have a good start, especially with most of my Gambia stories already told here. Here’s what you can expect to find now:
You find Travel on the main menu above with dropdown menus for stories started here and additional menu links on each country’s home page for related stories in other pages of the site. For example: my Gambia Missionary experiences and mission trips are on the HIS SPIRIT menu first and thus linked to there from this Travel Gambia Home Page or Kenya Home Page, etc. The software allows for drop down menus for only items initiated on that page, thus regular links to other pages like the missionary stories.
And since my photo galleries are actually on SmugMug.com, they cannot be on any of my site drop down menus but must be linked to from each country’s Home Page or found by going to the big gallery first from the above menu. I hope that is not confusing. Just use the country’s home page to find everything about that country. 🙂
I have only barely started on all the stories I want to tell, but for the main Travel section described above I have started these pages with more stories coming on each in the future:
My travel photos made before moving to Costa Rica are in a special sub-gallery title Pre-Costa Rica TRAVELS. Like my Costa Rica Trips gallery they are arranged chronologically by dates of each trip with most recent at top. At this moment, I have only travels to Africa included. Click above to see all or here is the list of my Africa Travel Galleries which will later be mixed in with other travels depending on the dates:
“The darkest thing about Africa
has always been our ignorance of it.”
~George Kimble
All photos by Charlie Doggett.
Questions? Contact me!
When Lee Holloway introduced me to and gave me a copy of the 1931 historical adventures storybook Yankee Ships in Pirate Waters by Rupert Sargent Holland back in the early 1970’s while at The Brotherhood Commission, I had no idea how far it would lead in my future research of an 1800’s ship with my name.
For a long time I have had the research website on The Ship Charles Doggett (the definitive website on the ship) and along the way discovered the relationships of the ship to Nashville and a friend there who is a descendant of the ship’s captain, William Driver. Driver is buried in Nashville. (Click above link for more info.) Also while there I learned of the U.S. Flag first being called “Old Glory” while flying on the Brig Charles Doggett with the actual flag at The Smithsonian Institute National Museum in Washington, DC. My web page above tells exciting stories of the flag, especially during the Civil War in a Confederate State Capital.
Then later I learned that it was this ship that rescued the survivors of “Mutiny on the Bounty.” Wow! The stories go on and are many and exciting as presented in this one 48-page Chapter 7 of the 1931 book Yankee Ships in Pirate Waters by Rupert Sargent Holland.
As I have always intended to do, I finally scanned or used a print shop in Atenas to scan the pages of the stories for me. I now include those pages here. The chapter on The Charles Doggett is titled “Children of the Sun” and was introduced with this summary: “How the men of the ‘Charles Doggett’ angered a witch-doctor, fought Fiji cannibals, and saved a sister-ship from yellow pirates in the gulf of Tongking.” You can read the stories online here now at Chapter 7: Children of the Sun. A fun read! And just one more bit of valuable information on this website. 🙂
Continue reading at Chapter 7: Children of the Sun.
¡Pura Vida!
The other day I came across this youth group painting an environmental message on the sidewalk at one of the busiest corners in Atenas Central in front of a furniture store, across the street from Mercado Central and across another street from our University Extension campus.
They are painting messages on several well-traveled sidewalk corners in town too create ecological awareness (conciencias de ecologica) or awareness of global warming (conciencias de calentamiento global) for the people of Atenas. The youth of today are the leaders of tomorrow and their actions speak well for our future.
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
—Margaret Mead
People from around the world study ecology at Costa Rica’s Earth University people who are changing the world for good (link is to English Language site)
Also a visitor’s English-Language Report on Costa Rica’s Earth University
¡Pura Vida!
Check out the free electronic preview of all pages of my latest Costa Rica photo book at: http://www.blurb.com/b/9079446-rancho-humo or click the book cover image below. Use “full screen mode” to best see these photo pages. I think my books & photos are getting a little better. 🙂
Charlie Doggett – Retired in Costa Rica
¡Pura Vida!
Some youth in the city of Alajuela left a sidewalk chalk message for pedestrians the other day: something like “Be aware of the city and REDUCE pollution!”
¡Pura Vida!
That’s my new Kindle Fire HD 8 above beside a real book I’m also reading. It is my second Kindle ever and 1 inch taller which does make the print a little larger and easier to read, but there are some things I don’t like as well as on my old 5-year-old Kindle. First, the cover is simply not as good and does not stand up on my dining table as well as the old one. Inside it is more complicated and confusing to use electronically for this old man – beginning to show my age? But I will get used to it and love it eventually. 🙂
DIGITAL ON KINDLE: The Seven Storey Mountain
Written in 1948, this is the autobiography of a spiritual mentor whose writings I like and who is of the same generation of my parents, Thomas Merton. He describes his “coming of age” as an adult and discovering who he really is from first the adventures of life and then the spiritual dimension of life and at 68% through the book (Kindle tells you that) he is still struggling with what his vocation will be but even more so with his relationship with God. Been there, done that! 🙂
REAL PAPER BOOK FROM FRIEND: The Gringos Hawk (not available digitally)
I’m only about a fourth of the way through this hardback book which is also an adult coming of age autobiography of a young man of my generation this time, published in 2001. Not as spiritual as Merton’s, yet more adventurous as American Jon Marañon ends up in southern Costa Rica on the Pacific Coast (where I love traveling) and as a 23 year old buys a tract of land on the coast at a bargain price. Then the problems and adventures begin dealing with government regulations, local farmers, and even a “witch” along with illnesses, injuries, etc. And that is as far as I am in the story now. But it is the kind of thing I too might have done in the 1960’s if I had not been, like Thomas Merton, highly motivated by what I considered a “calling” from God. Young men struggling with who they are!
I will report back when I have finished both bios and how I am relating to them then. It is funny how I identify with both guys of two different generations and two different worlds and somehow ended up reading both stories at the same time. 🙂